The present invention relates to a user interface for providing a text output on a display and an audio output corresponding to the displayed text,
The synthesis of human speech using electronic devices is a well developed and published technology and various commercial products are available. Typically speech synthesis programs convert written input to spoken output by automatically generating synthetic speech and speech synthesis is therefore often referred to a “Text-to-Speech” conversion (TTS).
There are several problems in speech synthesis which, as yet, have not been satisfactorily resolved and which impact on the comprehension of the synthetic speech by a user. One problem is that certain words and syllables are more difficult to pronounce than others. Another problem is that the pronunciation rules are language dependent and a French word in an English text will often be mispronounced by the speech synthesizer.
The above mentioned problems may be exacerbated in mobile electronic devices such as mobile telephones or pagers which may have limited processing resources
It would be desirable to improve the level of comprehension a user has of the speech output from such speech synthesizer systems.